Hi Jeremy, I'm sorry to hear you're having a poor experience with our search feature. I'm the product manager for developers.google.com and definitely want to get this fixed.
First of all, it looks like we're not treating the left navigation properly; it's showing up as the snippet for the search results, which is no good. As for the results showing up in other languages, I was able to reproduce that as well. I've filed bugs with our engineering team for both of these issues and we'll get them fixed ASAP. I'm also noting your feedback around prioritizing newer API versions. Please keep the feedback coming! It's important to me that we have a superb search experience on developers.google.com, and while I know we've got a ways to go, it's one of our top priorities. -Aaron On Monday, August 11, 2014 9:45:40 AM UTC-4, Jeremy Chatfield wrote: > > > Go to developers.google.com. Navigate until you're in the AdWords API > section. Search for, ohh, "Impressions". Click on the results. Chances are > that you be taken to a page that is not in your interface language. You'll > be shown English documents (because, hey, it's Google, and translation just > isn't a thing, even in 2014). But you may be given "Haku" as your search. > Yes, you've been switched to Finnish. I've had language codes I don't even > recognise, and I worked in i18n, over a decade ago. > > What have you done to search, that the worlds' largest international > public search engine returns results in random languages? > > I'm not even going into why the search results are based on the navigation > elements of the page rather than the actual content. The number of search > results you have to ignore when you search for "search query" is genuinely > impressive. It's like search from 1995. > > The API documentation is hard enough, without having to navigate the site > in weird languages, remembering to edit "hl=jp_JA" back to "en", or > wondering where any real resource is that deals with "search query" (8 of > the first 10 are not relevant, arguably 9, though the key result that > should be there, is present; one of the results is in German, one in > Portuguese, one in Finnish, one is a flat file presentation suitable for > printing, of a real HTML page, FFS). Half the time the results show v201402 > or even earlier versions, over 201406, etc. > > I know this is a bit of a rant, but, really, Google is *the* search > engine, and the developer resource should have a good representation of > search, shouldn't it? > > I know that technical documentation translation is not easy. Can I point > out, though I was head of R&D for a tiny site (<100k users) back in the > 2000's, when we did forward and back translation of all pages and > navigation, and error corrections, in less than 3 days, in 13 languages, > including some right-to-left languages. I'm not the world's best coder or > manager, and my little team could get this done. It can not be beyond the > wit of Google to MAKE THE SEARCH FUNCTION USABLE. Start by returning a sort > order that reflects the user interface language choice. Then tell your > custom search engine to reduce the priority on older versions and increase > the priority on more recent versions of the API. Improve the page content - > with a Google Search Appliance/Custom Engine you can tell it where the > content is (fix the page templates!), and stop promoting results because > navigation menus mention the words. It really shouldn't be very hard. > > It is very frustrating to use a search engine developers' resource, that > implements search so badly. > > Rant over. Thank you for your attention. > -- -- =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~ Also find us on our blog and Google+: https://googleadsdeveloper.blogspot.com/ https://plus.google.com/+GoogleAdsDevelopers/posts =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AdWords API Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-api?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AdWords API Forum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
